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Look out, chocolate lovers: extortion in the world's No. 1 cocoa-producing country is threatening to hinder the global supply of chocolate and send prices of its key ingredient higher.

Ivory Coast, a West African nation that supplies 36% of the world's cocoa beans, is battling rogue police officers and soldiers who are blocking roads and demanding payment to allow beans to pass from farms to ports.

The banditry has occurred for decades, but recently has been exacerbated by the nation's new rules designed to make sure farmers get a fair price. As the farmers are able to sell their cocoa for more, the more attractive it is to steal. Both trends will conspire to send cocoa prices higher over the next three months, the period in which the majority of the crops are transported.

"A lot of farmers at the very local level are still a little bit uncertain in terms of their physical security and safety as they transport their beans to the market," says James Clinton Francis, a sub-Saharan Africa researcher at Eurasia Group, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm. In some cases, farmers are abandoning their efforts.

Rather than risk "getting killed," says commodities analyst Jimmy Tintle, "farmers would much rather let [their cocoa beans] rot in the field." Tintle is the chief executive of GreenKey Alternative Asset Services, a commodities consultancy in Longwood, Fla.

This squeeze on cocoa supply comes as everyone's favorite bean was already heading for a deficit this year. Goldman Sachs is already forecasting a global cocoa-supply deficit of about 100,000 metric tons during the 2012-13 crop year that began on Oct. 1. As a result, the bank pegged its 12-month forecast, released in a Jan. 13 report, for cocoa traded on the ICE Futures U.S. exchange at $2,500 a ton, a level that futures last traded at in December.

Front-month cocoa prices on ICE settled on Friday at $2,232 a ton, up 1.2% or $27 on the week.

GOVERNMENT REFORMS TO Ivory Coast's cocoa sector—required for International Monetary Fund aid—have pushed the decades-old racketeering to new and more dangerous heights. As part of the reform, the country now guarantees a minimum price to farmers of 725 CFA francs (about $1.50) per kilogram of cocoa beans.

Middlemen must pay at least that price to a farmer for beans that they will then transport to ports. However, the middlemen can find their margins slashed—or eliminated—when they have to sell the beans at levels based on international prices, which have been plumbing seven-month lows.

These intermediaries, when facing little or no profits, have a much greater incentive to throw in their lot with the ex-militia members and corrupt police officers who extort farmers bringing their beans to market, say analysts and traders. The middlemen can tip off the bandits as to when the beans are being transported—in exchange for a cut of the take.

This is not a good situation in a nation with plenty of ex-soldiers who remain idle after a bloody confrontation that followed a disputed presidential election two years ago. "The second people start talking about any type of military presence [in Ivory Coast], you're looking at disruption and [a] fear premium being added to cocoa," says Hector Galvan, a senior broker at R.J. O'Brien Futures in Chicago.